Sunday, May 26, 2013

This is the first
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.

When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee)

I actually saw
this on TMN before the festival, in installments, but I’m glad the programmers
allowed a space for it on the big screen, where it must have been overwhelming.
Over four hours, Lee constructs a detailed, often anguished account of
Hurricane Katrina, built primarily on the testimony of those who lived through
it, who lost their homes or family members, or were dislocated, or left crushed
by the inadequacy of the response at all levels. The documentary footage, of
course, is hard to process; the frailty of human infrastructure has never been
established so cruelly. Lee’s approach is sober and meticulous, nailing all the
salient points about FEMA and Bush and insurance companies (who are subject to
some particularly damning testimony) and the local authorities, but never
overplaying it, always returning quickly to the human consequences - it’s
conspicuously short on the moments of optimism that normally pepper such
documentaries. Six months or more after the disaster, vast areas remain
unreclaimed, bodies continue to be found, and victims languish wherever they
were dropped down (often without regard to family unity), and although the
Mayor talks about rebuilding New Orleans, there’s no sense that the
institutional willpower exists for such a task. For a director often regarded
as flashy and bombastic, Lee is amazingly restrained here, and his film soars
on that sorrowful maturity.

Belle toujours
(Manoel de Oliveira)

De Oliveira,
believe it or not, is 98 years old. His films don’t get shown much outside the
film festival, but I very much enjoyed his Je
rentre a la maison a few years ago (made when he was a mere 93) – it was
clearly self-referential, but with an entrancing sense of ethicism and elegance
(and a funny contrivance about a phenomenally miscast film of Joyce’s Ulysses). The new film is a homage and
quasi-sequel to Belle de Jour,
dedicated to its creators Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere, with two of the
main characters meeting again forty years later (Michel Piccoli reprises his
original role, and Bulle Ogier replaces Catherine Deneuve, quite effectively).
De Oliveira isn’t as elegant or as wicked a filmmaker as Bunuel, but his more
static style suits the premise of personal demons relaxed by age, and he does
work in a couple of images and ideas weird enough to suggest that the old
surrealist’s spirit may momentarily have taken over. At other times, in truth,
the film just seems a little off (it has, for one thing, the least persuasive
prostitutes in recent cinema, not that I didn’t find them rather charming).
Much of it though is silent and contemplative, so that the homage is most
persuasive at the broad conceptual level, when it merely conveys the
contentment of observing something (or someone) of abiding beauty.

Fantasma
(Lisandro Alonso)

This is Alonso’s
third film; at the time of his second, Los
Muertos, the festival programme book called him “one of the most talented
and visionary filmmakers to emerge from the New Argentine Cinema movement.”
Difficult to assess exactly how huge a compliment that might be, but Los Muertos struck me as somewhat
academic, although well sustained. Fantasma
is built around a premiere screening of Los
Muertos, with the lead actor and virtually no one else attending. The event
is framed by various mundane activities within the somewhat run down building
complex. In subject and execution, the film is an elevation of cinema,
insisting on the fascination inherent in marginal events and on the privileged
nature of our spectatorship; and Alonso’s willingness to place his own previous
film in such a desultory light shows some laconic amusement at the ultimate
stature of the cinematic artist. Having said that, the “vision” here is limited
and insular, and the film yields nothing that hasn’t been amply implemented
elsewhere. As if it wasn’t already divorced enough from externalities, Fantasma is also (per the programme
book) a “devoted homage” to Tsai Ming-Liang’s Good Bye, Dragon Inn, prompting the thought that Alonso’s next film
desperately needs to be about anything
other than cinema itself.

The Caiman
(Nanni Moretti)

Moretti’s movies
are generally as understated and modest, and yet as slyly impactful, as the man
himself seems to be, prodding gently and quizzically at their subjects, without
leaving you feeling any major possibilities have been sold short. For much of
its length though I wondered if The
Caiman was equal to his usual standard. It’s about Silvio Berlusconi, only
recently deposed as Italian Prime Minister after a long, incredibly
controversial tenure; filtered through the device of a movie producer, down on
his personal and professional luck, who’s trying to finance a young director’s
film about the Great Man. In many ways, it’s Moretti’s most conventional work;
the family dynamics and comic set-ups are distinctly short on the grace notes
we expect from him, and they frequently overwhelm the film’s political core.
The tone often seems rather resigned, as if implicitly accepting the opinion
delivered by Moretti himself (in a cameo where he’s offered and turns down the
lead role in the film within the film) that there’s nothing new to say about
Berlusconi, and merely lurching on for the sake of it. But it all seems much
cannier in light of the complacency-busting finale, where the framing story
falls apart, the gloves come off, and Moretti makes the extent of Berlusconi’s
assault on democracy almost frighteningly clear.

Coeurs (Alain Resnais)

In my preview
article, I highlighted the 84-year-old Resnais’ new film as probably the one I
was most looking to overall. Not that his films have necessarily been among my
favourites, but I bow before any octogenarian who continues to experiment,
particularly when the most recent results have actually been rather sweet. Coeurs is in many ways one of his most
straightforward films, with six unfulfilled characters connecting in various
mostly unfulfilling ways (it’s based on an Alan Ayckbourn play, with the
illustrative title Private Fears in
Public Places). The tone is mostly quiet, refracted through a gauzy,
sometimes almost abstracted image quality and a recurring motif of falling
snow. There are no exterior scenes, and indeed the search for a satisfactory
living space is a key theme - as if one’s inner lack might be externalized and
conquered through structure and furniture (the film’s most devout character,
and possessor of its most astonishing hidden depths, describes the human quest
as being to avoid damnation by trying to pull the hellfire out of ourselves).
Resnais expertly blends the film’s depressing connotations into a strangely
beguiling surface, one that sometimes quivers with melancholy; he’s well aided
by wonderful acting, mostly by actors who’ve worked with him many times before.
My hopes for this film were higher than my expectations, but it’s pleasing to
report that hope triumphed.

Michel Gondry’s film The We and the I is set almost entirely on a New York bus, mostly
populated by teenagers heading home after the last day of school before the
summer: the bus starts off full to overflowing, and ends up virtually empty.
Early on it’s mostly full of goofing around as the kids feed off each other; as
it goes on, and the collective energy gets diluted, more serious issues and
preoccupations come to the form. Since the movie is set in the present day,
everyone has a cellphone, so that verbal and behavioural connections are
constantly reinforced with electronic ones (in this environment, when someone
doesn’t instantly receive the latest video in circulation, it can only be a
conscious act of exclusion). Beyond providing glimpses of what they’re looking
at, Gondry expands the filmic universe only sparingly, through brief low-tech
visualizations of various fantasies and experiences, reminiscent of similar
arts-and-crafts devices he used in his films The Science of Sleep and Be
Kind Rewind.

The We and the I

Gondry’s original conception of the film
was quite vague and unfinished; he fleshed it out by working with real kids in
an after-school Bronx program, so that much of what’s in there represents the
participants’ own language and experiences. It must be taken in part then as an
anthropological exercise, intended to capture something real and current and
pressing about their lives and times. In this regard, much as you’d expect, the
movie confirms some old impressions while asserting some newer ones. If, like
me, you don’t spend that much time around teenagers, it’s easy to forget how
sharply eloquent and inventive they are, and of course, how the dynamics of the
group may punish those who can’t keep up, or otherwise fail to define their own
space. Much of the conversation is a form of testing and positioning, of
establishing who knows what and where it gets them. That aside, although the
film is of course in large part a celebration, large elements of it might be
assessed as fairly horrific. I don’t just mean the specific evocation of
youthful death toward the end, but the low- and not-so-low-level harassment,
invasion of personal space and property damage that seems on this evidence to
be an inescapable part of their regular discourse.

Even more than for many new releases,
it’s hard to see the logic of having this film open on one screen at the TIFF
Lightbox in the same week as many other movies, with no particular fanfare or
context: it’s overwhelmingly the kind of thing that one might take or leave, or
at best leave for cable or DVD (when I went, there were fewer than ten people
in the audience). This is the emblematic film which, if it has any hope of
causing a ripple, can only do so as part of a broader conversation. Personally,
I wouldn’t have had as good a time if the place had been full of boisterous
Toronto teenagers, targeted into using the film as a springboard for active
dialogue about their own lives, but it would have made more sense as a strategy
for the film. To treat something like The
We and the I as a regular filmgoing experience, presented for the sober
engagement of regular cinephiles, runs the severe risk of denying the immediacy
of what it represents.

Broader intentions

That’s not to say Gondry doesn’t have broader
aesthetic intentions. In an interview he described how he had the original idea
“about a more upper-class area in
Paris, when I took the bus 20 years ago, and when the kids came out of school
they were really shallow and aggressive. They would leave the bus one after the
other, the group was getting smaller and the group would get more
philosophical, personal.” That basic structure and shift is prominent in The We and the I, and although it seems
valid as an exercise in group dynamics, Gondry makes the closing stretch much more philosophical and personal
than what preceded it, using the “last day before summer” conceit to tease out various
strands that one imagines might not be as pressing on aregular day (for the riders at the end of the
line, by the way, one can’t help thinking that there must be a closer school
available – the film lasts over an hour and a half and conveys the sense of
proceeding more or less in real time – but maybe that only tells you how little
I appreciate the grind that a lot of kids have to put up with). It’s not that
the material is implausible, but that it’s plainly compressed, and although
that’s inevitable in any such project, one wonders here if it has the effect of
romanticizing the milieu. But maybe that’s the whole point, to assert that this
place and time, and these kids, support a whole range of emotional and thematic
possibility, and of creative force (one kid makes a habit out of spinning engaging
tall tales about his glamorous life, which Gondry visualizes in his trademark
manner).

For another kind of example: at one
point, the bus goes past a woman on a bike, her summer dress blowing, looking
as serene as if she were traveling through a French meadow rather than the
Bronx, and they all seem to catch their breaths at the unexpected loveliness,
until one of them makes a vulgar remark and the moment’s gone. It’s a striking episode,
and rather complicated: it taps into the universal longing for transcendent
experiences, however fleeting; at the same time, it’s impossible not to
register that this is virtually (and perhaps literally, I can’t quite remember)
the only white woman in the whole film. The film would be poorer without this
brief passage, and yet one wonders whether it’s a passage that belongs mainly
to the “we” of the kids, or to the “I” of the director.

Beyond the bus route

On the other hand, if this imaginary
group discussion I was visualizing taking place around the film was ultimately
going to be worth anything, it would have to carry an aspirational quality –
not that such communities should be ashamed or should focus on their own
limitations, but it can’t be enough to say life goes no further than the bus
route. The film has several students who are interested in art and others whose
sensibilities appear a little broader; including the accomplished fantasist I
mentioned. By its very existence, the film embodies the possibility of
connection and crossing boundaries – Gondry is French after all, and his next
project is a French-language drama with Audrey Tautou, which might seem as far
removed from here as humanly possible. If the film were just about a bus ride
through the Bronx, it might be hard to care that much, no matter what our
sociological interests. But it’s a bigger journey than that.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

I eventually went to see the latest Harry
Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix,
on the Imax screen at the Paramount – sorry, the Scotiabank – giving in to the
enticement of 3-D (for certain sequences only). An opening announcement informed
us that a green symbol would occasionally pop up at the bottom of the screen,
as the prompt to put on our 3-D glasses. As the movie kept rolling by without
any sign of this symbol, I became convinced that I was missing it – perhaps by
slumping too low in my seat for example – and spent much time sneaking glances
at the rest of the audience, who I kept imagining might already be transported
to a different zone of perception.

Harry Potter

Well, eventually the symbol turned up, and
the glasses came on, just in time for some big flying dragons that naturally
swoop out of the screen right into your face, and then for a good fifteen
minutes beyond that. It’s a mixed blessing I’d say. Occasionally it generates
astonishingly vivid, almost overwhelming images. But at other times the
heightened definition in the foreground draws too much attention to the
flatness of the background, and images containing characters at different
depths appear unnatural. I had some trouble following flurries of action too.
I’m not an expert in the science of perception, but I wonder whether the
ambition of giant-sized 3-D isn’t fundamentally at odds with the way our brains
process images. Oh, and the glasses they gave me had dirty lenses.

The technology may take yet another leap forward
before 2009, when James Cameron returns with Avatar, supposedly to be filmed and exhibited entirely in 3-D.
Anyway, that was really my only point of interest in the Potter movie. I’ve
seen the previous four, and although I know the first was clunky and saccharine
compared to later installments, I nevertheless enjoyed it the most, simply
because of its sense of wonder and discovery. The Potter movies are much
darker, more brooding now, which sounds more thematically interesting, except
that it’s all such nonsense. At this point it becomes obvious I haven’t read
the books either. Well actually I did read the second one, in French, just to
see if I could pull it off. It seemed to me pretty dire. But that was after the
translator got to it.

I’ve pretty much forgotten the plot of the
fourth movie, but a lot of Order of the
Phoenix seemed highly familiar, so I’m guessing that’s where I saw it
before. As usual, a lot of great actors hang round to deliver a handful of
lines apiece, and the central trio isn’t maturing very interestingly. Obviously
the film’s technical accomplishments provide much to praise, just as a visit to
a science lab does. I really don’t mean to be negative. It’s just not for me.
It was the same week, you know, that Bergman and Antonioni died.

No Reservations

No
Reservations is a distinctly 2-D remake of the 2001
German film Mostly Martha. That was a
nicely poised, sensitive work, although seldom surprising. The new version,
drenched in Hollywood sensibility up to the very brim of its pestle, blands out
the recipe with off the shelf cuteness (and a side order of would-be
poignancy). Catherine Zeta-Jones, who melds a little too perfectly with this
limited ambition, is a brilliant chef who spends too much time in the kitchen
and not enough in the bedroom; Aaron Eckhart is way too good to be true as the
assistant chef who helps her make a breakthrough. Virtually all of the movie’s
potential themes were handled more deftly in Ratatouille – even that film’s cartoon food looked more mouth
watering than the real creations on display here (if you’ve seen pretty
truffles and scallops and crème brulees once, you’ve seen ‘em a million times).
The credits say it was directed by Scott Hicks, who made Shine, but it’s just as plausible that it was made by a
PG-programmed robot: it has absolutely nothing idiosyncratic, nothing even
slightly daring. Not even a recipe. Excuse me while I sweep the toast crumbs
off the keyboard.

Two
Days in Paris was written and directed (her debut)
by the interesting actress Julie Delpy, who stars in it along with Adam
Goldberg. They're a couple on a stopover in her native Paris, where their
disheveled but highly viable relationship nearly buckles under the challenges
of her wacky parents (played by Delpy's own parents - we can only hope for her
sake that they're hyping themselves up big-time), her numerous old lovers, and
Paris' charming (or to him, horrible) quirks. In many ways it's going for a
vibe similar to that of Delpy's career highlight, Before Sunrise and its sequel, although she crams more into this
film, giving it a more raucous energy (less potential profundity though). It
weakens a bit as it goes on (although she finds a way to freshen up a
conventional ending) but for most of the way it's very funny and engrossing. I
hope she gets to make more movies.

Klimt

I was thinking that one day soon I should
update the article I wrote a few years ago in which I mused on who might have
won the Nobel prize for cinema, if one existed. If I get to that, I’m sure my
fictional Academy will be awarding the prize to Raul Ruiz any year now. Ruiz, a
Chilean exile who settled in France, used to make three or four films a year,
many instantly lost to obscurity, although he’s slowed down now. I’ve seen only
a few of them, and I’m sure I could spend my life searching and not get more
than a third of the way through his oeuvre. The masterpiece of those I’ve seen
is the 1983 Three Crowns of the Sailor,
a remarkable piece of romantic myth that remakes itself over and over in the
course of two indescribable hours. His most famous film is likely the 1999
Proust adaptation Time Regained: it’s
certainly fascinating on its own terms, although I couldn’t say about Proust’s.

His latest film Klimt, another study of an artist, received a rare if brief Toronto
release. It’s another fairly fascinating work, although I’d guess it’s solidly
second tier Ruiz, with the air of revisiting (if not recycling) earlier
techniques. The artist, sensitively played by John Malkovich, often seems here
like little more than a pawn in a game of time bending, transposition, reverie
and mystery, and some of Ruiz’s devices (characters who don’t really exist, a
repeated motif of breaking glass) are definitely shopworn. When I left the
theatre I didn’t think I’d learned much of anything about Klimt, although on
subsequent Internet-aided consideration I was surprised how much of his
essential biography the film contains. By the same token, Ruiz shows
surprisingly little of the painter’s work, and explains less, but afterwards I
was impressed how much somehow came across, as if Ruiz’s complex structure were
a code that your aesthetic sense slowly interprets subliminally. This basic
attribute, whereby even a director’s lesser works still resonate more
rewardingly afterwards than most of their contemporaries’ prime achievements,
goes down real big with my award committee.

Rodney Ascher’s new documentary Room 237 is an enjoyable journey to one
of the many peculiar fringes of cinematic preoccupation. It’s an investigation
of sorts into Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The
Shining, one of the emblematic works for which the whole somehow seems to
amount to much more than the sum of the parts. Ascher builds his film around
five unseen commentators, all after years of reflection and multiple close
viewings proposing different paths into the film. One detects references to the
treatment of native Americans; another to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust;
another sees it as Kubrick’s hidden acknowledgment of his role in faking the
footage of the Apollo 11 movie landings.

Filming The Shining

Kubrick’s film, you’ll likely recall, was
based on Stephen King’s novel about a troubled man, Jack Torrance, who takes a
job as a winter janitor in a remote Colorado resort hotel, bringing along his
wife and young son, who has telepathic powers; under the hotel’s malign
influence (emanating in particular from the supernatural imprint of a
predecessor janitor who went mad and murdered his family), Torrance loses his
bearings completely. I haven’t seen the film in a few years, and I haven’t read
the book for decades, but I remember having mixed feelings when I first saw it
– as many others did – about Kubrick’s dumping of much of King’s backstory,
barely allowing us any time with the pre-crisis Torrance (the coarsening of
Jack Nicholson’s image seems to date from his performance here). King himself
disliked the movie, and later wrote and produced his own more faithful version
for TV.

I now imagine that Kubrick assessed the source
material as being essentially somewhat silly, and understood that normal
concepts of “causality” and “motivation” and suchlike rapidly become absurd in
such contexts; at the same time of course, suspending or short-circuiting these
concepts allows huge potential creative flexibility and evocative power. One of
the (I think) most prescient comments in Room
237 posits that The Shining works
as a kind of dream in which elements of a fraught past circulate, and in which the
film’s present represents an attempt to grapple with it (Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut seems to have flowed from
a similar intention). To the extent it only encompasses the specific traumas of
the hotel, this “waking dream” theory might seem largely obvious, but Room 237 is intermittently quite
persuasive in arguing that Kubrick broadened the effect by implanting or
knowingly allowing some or all of the historical events I mentioned to echo
through the film, and it’s very informative on how aspects of design and
artfully broken continuity contribute to this.

No accidents?

Even more than most films, little in The Shining is accidental. The sets were
constructed entirely in England, somewhat based on, but in no way scrupulously
faithful to, an actual hotel in Colorado; everything the commentators latch
onto, whether the labels on cans of food, or the lettering of a room key,
reflects some kind of deliberate decision of design or procurement (by someone
anyway, if not necessarily by Kubrick). Because The Shining is so concentrated, and is so visually precise and
uncluttered, and because of Kubrick’s immense attention to light and design,
and his facility with startling swerves of behaviour and expression, his images
carry immense weight; watching them before video and DVD, it’s no surprise if audiences
carried the constant sense of something escaping them.

But does this in any way constitute a kind
of “code” that demands to be broken? Girish Shambu argues, not unfairly, that Room 237 is essentially a
“representation of the practice of film criticism,” and as such sees two
problems in the film: that the practice “often comes across as outré, freakish
or crackpot” and that “film criticism here is a largely apolitical, hermetic
activity that moves inwards, carving out a self-enclosed space, the space of a
cognitive puzzle, a puzzle to be solved based on clues well hidden by a genius
filmmaker.” He goes on: “Spotting hidden references to the Holocaust or to the
genocide of Native Americans is not in itself a critically or politically
reflective activity. The Shining (while being a wonderful film, for many
reasons) simply does not engage with these weighty historical traumas. It is
not ‘about’ them in any meaningful way. And neither does it have to be
in order to be a great film. But when Room 237 represents film analysis
in a manner that treats it as little more than a clever puzzle-solving
exercise, it gives no hint as to the social value and political/aesthetic worth
of this public activity. It never intuits what is truly at stake in the
activity of paying close, analytical attention to films.”

Total balderdash

I think those are
entirely fair comments, if you accept the initial premise that Room 237 is in some sense about film
criticism. But I don’t think that’s really the case. For one thing, film
criticism is always inevitably a function of the critic’s own ideology,
sensibility and so forth as much as of the film itself. But Ascher goes out of
his way to withhold this element from Room
237 – we never see the commentators, and pick up only stray bits of
biographical detail about them (at one point, one of them interrupts himself to
go and deal with a crying child, a rather curious editing decision which at
least confirms we’re not listening solely to a series of friendless loons). He
could plainly have tried to adjudicate some of this, by bringing in people who
worked on the film (Leon Vitali, Kubrick’s assistant of the time, has said he “was falling about laughing most of the time,” while
watching Room 237, adding: “There are
ideas espoused in the movie that I know to be total balderdash”) or appealing
to more distanced commentators for perspective. Absent any of this, the film
becomes more of an abstracted reverie (I doubt many viewers will keep all of
the commentators separate in their minds – certainly I couldn’t) on engagement
and possibility and, whether they’d acknowledge it or not, play. Shambu’s absolutely
right: Ascher never says to them, basically, well even if you’re right, so
what? - what do we now know about (say) the Holocaust that we didn’t before?
But in this context you can see that as an act of benevolence rather than
omission.

Frankly,
as filmic obsessions go, we’re dealing in a fairly elevated neighbourhood here.
I’m sure the majority of obsessive multiple viewing in the world is directed
towards things like the Lord of the Rings
trilogy and the Star Wars series, an
exercise which truly has no purpose other than to remove you from real concerns
and to cement your identity as a hapless tool of calculated corporatism. The
commentators in Room 237 may not be
spending all their time as productively as they could, but at least they’re in
an extended conversation of sorts with a work of art, which is more than most
people ever manage to sustain.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

I
think I’m finally honed this movie watching thing to a state that pleases me.
For years I’ve moaned about how the art of cinema gets crowded out, even for
true believers, by the shrewd, calculating weight of the commercial machine.
I’ve moaned about it, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been that good at resisting
it.

As I
write this, on the weekend of May 2, some 15 new movies just opened in New
York, based on TheNew York Times review section. There is,
categorically, no meaningful aesthetic, intellectual or life-enhancing standard
by which X-Men Origins: Wolverine is
the most significant of those offerings. Of course, by the nature of the
investment it represents, it carries the most urgent commercial imperative, but this ought to mean about as much to film
lovers as a new flavour of frozen juice means to a gourmet chef. And yet, even
serious film writers give Wolverine
pride of place (in, for example, The New
York Times review section). Let’s not fool ourselves this is some
reflection of democracy or cultural temperature. It’s an orchestrated crafting
of the public discourse, and Hollywood’s great at keeping it going.

Spoiled for choice

I
don’t mind it; I just wish I were
better at ignoring it. But I’m getting better. Yes, I saw the previous X-men
movies, although they never meant a thing to me. But no Wolverine - I mean it. After years of seeing three or even four new
movies a week in a hopeless attempt to cover all the bases, I’ve kept it to two
a week, at the most, this year. Further, those one or two are often far from
the “obvious” two to see, if I were writing say for the Toronto Star. So by my weak standards, that’s some sustained
fortitude. And this opens up more time for what really interests me more and
more, which is to revisit and deepen my appreciation of cinema’s huge, gorgeous
past. Of course, except in the most tokenistic of ways, it’s contrary to
Hollywood’s ongoing needs to promote too acute an interest in previous decades,
because if people really tuned into the extent of the decline, they’d just
ignore all the new junk, stay at home and watch well-chosen DVDs.

In an
environment where 10 or 15 new movies get into theaters (maybe not here, but
somewhere), every week, and some multiple of that circulates around the
festival circuit, it seems increasingly hopeless to me even to aim for
capturing the cream of the crop. I mean, what are we supposed to put weight on?
The Oscars? Hardly. A few well-chosen critics with sensibilities seemingly
close to one’s own? It helps narrow things down, but no more than that. And how
do you define the cream of the crop anyway? As I’ve often written here, movies’
lasting impact and stimulation often comes from their flaws (however you define
that!) as from their unexceptional
strengths. To be honest, I miss the old days (not that I was around for them)
when everyone could simply agree to watch Bergman and Fellini; it must have
saved a lot of time, and the payoff sure wasn’t too bad. But now we’re defined
by democratization and fragmentation. Sadly, it means it’s increasingly harder
to have an informed, engaged conversation about any aspect of culture, except
for junk topics like Susan Boyle – no one’s ever seen the same thing. Choice
and self-determination can be lonely things.

Anyway,
that Saturday I went to a movie I’d never even heard of until a few days
previously – Adrift in Tokyo, the
latest example of the downtown AMC’s admirable policy of devoting one or two
screens to obscure foreign films. To be honest, I read the movie was
essentially two characters wandering around Tokyo, and since my wife and I
spent a few days last year doing exactly that, I thought, well, that sounds
good enough. The movie was sweet and engaging, but I wonder if any of us will
ever hear of it again. Then the following day, having no idea how to choose
between such possibilities as Act of God,
Tulpan and The Lemon Tree, I just
threw up my hands and stayed at home. Will this be a trend? I really don’t
know. I’m not even sure what I’m hoping for.

State of Play

I’m
not saying the occasional Hollywood movie doesn’t grab me, on thematic or other
grounds. Star Trek probably will, but
that’s a story for another week. The week before I saw Adrift in Tokyo, I put my money down for State of Play, directed by Kevin McDonald. It’s a two-hour
Americanized adaptation of a six-hour British TV drama; I never saw that, but
many writers detected a loss of complexity and nuance in translation. What’s
left isn’t too shabby though. Russell Crowe (memorably described in The New Yorker as resembling a dumpling
in a wig) is a crack journalist for the fictional Washington Globe, covering a local double murder; meanwhile the
paper’s online political blogger, played by Rachel McAdams, stalks the latest
political scandal involving hot young Congressman Ben Affleck, who happens to
be Crowe’s best friend. The two stories turn out to be (a) linked and (b) just
the ribbon on top of a bigger package.

It’s
an old-fashioned creation, focusing on nuts and bolts gruntwork, and faithful
to the continuing primacy of print media. I liked how the suspense highpoint
involves Crowe merely hiding in a parking garage from a pursuing assassin,
scared out of his wits; no Cage-like transformations of ordinary Joe into
Superman. The film looks handsome enough, but could have used the greater
stylization of someone like Michael Mann, or in particular of Alan Pakula, who
owned the franchise on paranoia in the 1970’s (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View). There’s an evil
corporation in the mix, but it’s an awfully dull creation: maybe that’s part of
the point though, the banal face of high-stakes mendacity now. Likewise, the
stream of flavourful secondary characters could profitably have been made a
little spicier. Crowe himself though is very nuanced and enjoyable (and not at
all like anything made from batter, or pastry, or whatever it is).

Getting Worse

Recent
events may have overtaken the film a little bit. Assassins and bribery and
political influence peddling seem positively quaint compared to, you know, almost
bankrupting the world as we know it. And sadly the plight of the newspapers is
currently even worse than the film depicts (in the course of the movie,
McAdams’ character becomes something of a convert to the old ways, but in the
real world she’d surely be more of a new-media zealot than that). Still, at the
end it subtly tempers any sense of triumph; nowadays the spotlight of
achievement just makes you aware of how much darker everything else is getting
to be. Much as I enjoyed it, I wondered if in some subliminal way the essential
message wasn’t that it’s safer to stay at home.

I was reading an interview with the film
blogger Girish Shambu, and paused on the following passage:

“Finally,
scale of the image definitely matters to me; it’s hard for me to appreciate a
film on YouTube. I saw a terrific transfer of Edward Yang’s The
Terrorizers on YouTube recently. It’s a great, complex, nuanced
film, but I’ve already forgotten most of its images. I doubt that would have
happened if I’d seen it in a theatre or on a large TV.”

I went and looked for myself,
and indeed, there it was. It’s exactly the kind of thing I love finding online
– one of the less well-known films by a great director, one I’ve never seen
before, and not readily available otherwise (there’s no North American DVD of
it). And while I don’t know the legality of such things, I guess I could easily
convince myself that YouTube is a highly visible and law-abiding concern, and
that if anyone had a legitimate concern about the film’s presence on there
breaching a copyright, then it would have been removed. So I watched it too,
and enjoyed it a lot, and didn’t care in the least that it was on YouTube
rather than on a big screen. I watched it on a pretty large desktop, and sat up
real close, which was enough for me to feel immersed in it.

Submitting to the conditions

It seems to me that to be in
love with cinema is also to spend lots of time agonizing about that love, and
if you avoid one kind of agony, you submit to another. Shambu sets out various
other reasons why he prefers to view films in a movie theatre – for example “I enjoy submitting to the regime of viewing conditions in a movie
theatre... I like it that I can’t pause the film, get up and take care of
something mid-film, or wait until later to finish it” – but while I generally
like that too, over time I feel it more and more as, indeed, a submission. It’s
not so much the constraints of the specific experience – although as I get
older, I see others in the audience less and less as fellow contributors to a
mutually reinforcing mass pleasure, more and more merely as sources of
distraction – but of everything that surrounds it. If The Terrorizers played anywhere in Toronto, it would likely be at
the Bell Lightbox, in just one or two showings, most likely on a weekday
evening, thereby disrupting other stuff I value just as much as cinema. I used to do it – fifteen years ago there
were periods when I was at the Cinematheque Ontario for several evenings in a
row, even doing double bills some evenings, because there was just no other way
to see those rare Fassbinder films, or whatever it might have been.

But
that only gave me another version of Shambu’s problem with forgetting the
images – my appreciation of the movies was perpetually being chewed up by the movie
coming right after, by the logistics of scheduling and traveling and eating
around it, by sheer fatigue. It’s the same reason why I stopped going to the
film festival a few years ago. Although I know cinema inherently depends on our
relinquishing control, I’ve become accustomed to controlling the conditions of my loss of control. For me
this easily justifies the trade-offs on image quality and other matters, which
I don’t think inherently bother me as much anyway. I’ve occasionally been
completely immersed in films on flights for instance (albeit always on my own
laptop rather than on the in-flight system).

Trade-offs
of movie viewing

I
do admit my experience of a film sometimes suffers for taking too many pauses
in the course of watching it, but it’s just another trade-off – if I only
embarked on watching a movie when I was assured of finishing it in the same
sitting, I wouldn’t experience even a third as many films as I do. I guess I’m
a believer that the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

Those
fifteen-year-ago Cinematheque audiences were awfully thin at times, and while
the new Lightbox may have changed that, I doubt it. Take how I found out about The Terrorizers, on the web from someone
I don’t even know – if you extrapolated across the globe, you’d imagine
thousands of people must know about it by now. But actually, as I write this,
the film has only been viewed some 3,600 times, in over eighteen months! That’s
derisory really, but that’s just how it is – only a tiny number of people care
about foreign films beyond what’s new and current (if that), and even if they
do care, they don’t have time to dip in more than infrequently. Experiences
like The Terrorizers – even as
opportunities you can tap into for free, without leaving the house - are
already all but crowded out by the noise of the new and the necessary and the
prominent and the easy. If we stipulate further that the experience is only
fully realized when it happens in a movie theatre, then we’ll only slowly kill
off what little space such experiences still possess in this world. So we have no
choice but to retrain our faculties – to love and to own and to fight to
remember that image floating on the desktop, or on our laps, or at whatever
confined distance it might be, as if it were as high and inescapable as the
sky.

The
Terrorizers

As
for The Terrorizers, it’s one of only
eight films directed by Yang, who died in 2007: his best-known is the last, Yi Yi, which is on a Criterion
Collection DVD, and I did pay to own
that! The narrative follows several intertwining stories, but ultimately focuses
primarily on an unfulfilled hospital researcher whose wife, a novelist, leaves
him for another man – an event he finds impossible to accept or to rationalize.
Although there’s some violence in the film, I take the title to evoke much more
than that: the terrorizers might be the people who play thoughtless,
destructive pranks, but also encompass chilly, soul-destroying work
environments; those we can’t help loving even as they make us despair; and just
the whole human infrastructure and its traps, and the toll of trying to
navigate within it.

The
film’s excellent climax first fools us into thinking it might have been one
kind of story all along, while then revealing it was always a much quieter and
sadder one. Yang controls the film exquisitely, holding everything in balance;
afterwards you remember both the film’s many difficult silences and its sharp
eruptions of danger. Whether or not you retain its images, I’m certain you’ll
be influenced by the journey, which is all I ever hope for. And what a miracle,
really, to live in a time when one can take such a journey at home, without
paying a thing for it.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

When
Peter O’Toole won a special Oscar a few years ago, it struck me how barely
connected he was to the rest of the event. Whereas Meryl Streep could survey
the room at this year’s Golden Globes and announce (whether triumphantly or
wearily, I’m not sure) that she’d worked with just about all of them, O’Toole
poses a real challenge in the Six Degrees of Kevin Baconstakes (especially if you don’t cheat via the IMDB). I mean, can
you name anything he’s done in the last twenty years? Actually, there’s a lot
of it, but it’s all dross. Even those famous seven always a bridesmaid never a
bride Oscar nominations, always excepting Lawrence
of Arabia, won’t likely spring to mind too easily. It’s as if he was
playing a different game all the way along. And of course he was. The elements
of his legend can hardly be accommodated within the current industry –
brilliant but stylized performances, usually in historical epics or manifest
oddities; famously wanton behaviour, which must make Lindsay Lohan wistful if
she knows anything about it; sheer longevity, albeit in escalating eccentricity
and artistic obscurity. And, crucially, the inescapable sense that it should
all have amounted to more, and still might.

Venus

Hence
the excitement over O’Toole’s new film Venus,
certainly his meatiest part in years, giving him a valid shot at that Oscar at
last. O’Toole plays Maurice, a close version of himself, although hopefully the
real O’Toole has somewhat better digs and isn’t getting by quite so hand to
mouth. Hanging out in London with his equally aging pals, snatching a few days’
work here and there (mainly playing actual or pending corpses), he gets a new
lease on life via the disruptive, self-centered Jessie, a friend’s grand niece.
He takes her to the Royal Court theatre; she introduces him to Bacardi
Breezers. He recites to her from Shakespeare; she comes back with Kylie
Minogue. But already I can hear you saying, sure, that’s all very cute, but
here’s all that matters: do they actually do
it?

Well,
better put this aside for now if you’re relishing the suspense of finding out
for yourself, but the answer is no. Venus’
most interesting, albeit underdeveloped aspect, is in exactly how they don’t do it. Jessie is from a
traumatic background, she’s been abused and belittled, and this has left her
with “issues” about commitment and body image and connection. Part of her
initial attraction to Maurice is no doubt his presumed sexlessness, although
this quickly becomes complicated (he is played by Peter O’Toole after all).
Slowly she offers him a bit of this, a bit of that, always subject to her own
arbitrary but savagely imposed cut off lines. And Maurice goes along,
communicating a certain self-disgust, but nowhere near enough that there’s a
better way to spend his time. It makes for rather icky, almost sadistic
viewing, difficult to reconcile with the chirpy Corinne Bailey Rae song so
prominent in the trailer and the movie itself.

I
doubt it’s giving anything away to say they don’t get to live happily ever
after. The film’s final image is of Jessie, alone now, but having attained a
different echelon of confidence, in her body and apparently in herself, now
happily inhabiting O’Toole’s elevated vision of her. Based on this, the movie
ultimately seems to stand as the story of a woman who puts herself on track by
chewing up and spitting out a sad old man, albeit throwing him a few crumbs
along the way. In this regard, Jodie Whittaker’s performance as Jessie is quite
perfect in the sense that she’s resolutely (and I don’t mean to sound like an
elitist about this) a second rate woman – not that pretty or sexy and seemingly
not remotely interesting to listen to or be with: the kind of woman for whom
one merely settles, because she’s the best there is.

Samuel, The
Prophet!

The
film effectively evokes the stretched, borderline seedy atmosphere in which
Maurice is living out his days, sometimes coming close to the gritty socially
observant document of modern Britain normally associated with writer Hanif
Kureishi. But how interesting is any of that really? And more crucially, what
does it have to do with Peter O’Toole, who never seems fully integrated into
this scheme? It’s unclear how coherent the film is even trying to be in this
regard: when he visits a church and reads the names of real-life contemporaries
such as Robert Shaw and Laurence Harvey off the walls, it’s impossible not to
relate this to the real life actor’s pending mortality. It’s all a big show,
and ultimately you feel they’d have been better off dumping the plot,
especially since it’s so weird and slightly creepy, and just creating moments. As exhibited by Vanessa
Redgrave’s few scenes as O’Toole’s ex-wife, philosophical now about the way he
dumped her and their three kids for some glamorous co-star, not given much here
to convey beyond a kindly weathered quality, but doing it in classic fashion.

And
as exhibited by one of the film’s most intriguing moments, although it’s little
more than a throwaway, where Maurice has a small (but he insists pivotal) role
in some Marie Antoinette-type costume drama. We see him deliver his few lines,
and although we don’t know the context (and we don’t know if he knows either)
it’s completely mesmerizing, and you have no doubt how the old pro would
command the screen. This of course is the bread and butter of the real
O’Toole’s career – according to the IMDB, his next film is called One Night with the King, and listed way
down the cast list, he plays “Samuel, the Prophet”! The real object of Venus should surely have been to rescue
the actor, if only temporarily, from such a fate, but it never really gets
there, and thus ends up only sharpening your sad awareness of O’Toole’s odd
place in the annals of cinema.

This Film Is Not
Yet Rated

Kirby
Dick’s documentary about the US MPAA ratings board recently opened here for a
week, just ahead of its DVD release. The movie establishes easily enough that
the process is excessively secretive, penalizes sexuality more severely than
violence and in a manner subject to all sorts of silly rules and judgments, and
is basically just a self-serving tool of the studio system rather than a
rational contributor to the general understanding of movies. All of which is
fair enough, but really, is that news? And although I love movies as much as
anyone, and have no liking for arbitrary restrictions, this seems to me mostly
inside-the-box special pleading. More movies get made than ever, it’s easier
than ever to see them in one form or another, and what business doesn’t have
its problems? The biggest issue is that Dick spends all his time fretting about
Hollywood moves, and doesn’t chew on the real galvanizing questions, whether
political, ideological or cultural. America, and the world it makes, sink
deeper all the time into NC-17 territory, and being allowed to see a few more
seconds’ naked thrusting in a failed Atom Egoyan movie won’t help one hell of a
lot.

A few
months ago, someone in my building was trying to get me excited about the Tamil
action film Vishwaroopam, and
specifically in getting me excited enough that I’d trek out to Richmond Hill to
see it in its full splendor. I told him, quite honestly, that this was an
impossible task – I wouldn’t go to Richmond Hill to star in a film (so I’m a big downtown snob, what did you expect?) I
did look at the trailer on YouTube, but that just made it look like more
digital mayhem of the kind I’ve seen hundreds of times (and not even just in
English). I was intrigued by this aspect of it though: the film’s obviously a
huge deal even in pockets of our own city, but if you don’t move in those
pockets, then even a relatively cinema-savvy person like me might overlook its
existence altogether. Until fairly recently, I found it hard to let go of a
vision of cinematic omnipotence, based on the premise that I could
realistically aspire to have seen every notable film ever made, but thankfully,
I’ve given that up now.

Blind spots

I’d
concede Indian cinema as one of my major blind spots – I’ve seen virtually
nothing of what’s called “Bollywood,” although for whatever reason I did see
the Canadian Bollywood/Hollywood,
which seemed to me just wretched. I once saw the 1955 Raj Kapoor Shree 420, which I quite enjoyed and at
the time might have thought would lead to further viewing in that vein, but it
didn’t. That’s almost it for my viewing of Indian popular cinema. I guess
there’s something aspirational about my cinematic allegiances – for instance, I
always loved Japanese films, and so I wanted to visit Japan, which I also duly ended
up loving. I’ve never been that interested in visiting India, which perhaps
limits my interest in its cinema (or vice versa). (For reference, I was never
particularly interested in South American cinema either, and when I finally
traveled there a couple of years ago – to Ecuador – I was held up at
knife-point, so now I feel even more justified in these instincts. I do like
Iranian cinema without feeling a great need to travel there, but I guess no
correlation is perfect.)

Anyway,
I sometimes manage to score a point with my Indian acquaintances by citing a
few examples of Indian, uh, unpopular
cinema, which I’ve seen and they haven’t; often they’re only vaguely aware of
the films, if at all. For example, not long ago I watched Ritwik Ghatak’s 1960
film The Cloud-capped Star, a very
moving portrait of a young girl essentially destroyed by the demands of
supporting her poor family. It depicts a society alive to ideals, intellectual
pursuits, dreams of advancement, but devoid of any sustainable infrastructure
for achieving these, especially for women. The film is very detailed and evocative
about the limits of money and of the ambiguous attitudes to it, and it’s a
bleak slab of life, in no way overplayed or fanciful, but sometimes evoking an
almost cosmic incomprehension at the extent of human illogic and injustice.

Satyajit Ray

Unfortunately,
it’s very difficult to get to see any more of Ghatak’s twenty or so films (he
died in 1976). His most famous contemporary, by a long way, was Satyajit Ray,
much of whose work remains a bit more easily available. Ray maintained a
reputation in the West from his very first film, Pather Panchali, which won an award in Cannes in 1955 for “best
human document,” and he even won an honorary Oscar in 1992 “for
his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures and for his profound
humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and
audiences throughout the world.” The notion of humanism recurs in assessments
of Ray’s work – his isn’t a cinema of high concepts, but of deep awareness of
human struggle and constraints. The comments I just made on The Cloud-capped Star might well apply
to various Ray films, except for the bit about the almost cosmic
incomprehension: Ray is the most quietly earthbound of directors, which is both
his great, tangible strength and perhaps, if assessed by the highest of
standards, his relative limitation. You come out of his films marveling at your
new understanding of India, but not so much of yourself – even when you feel
that “human” connection, it’s perhaps too easy to say, well that’s India, and
to escape the sense of personal culpability.

That’s
not to say Ray’s films aren’t consistently fascinating and rewarding. I most
recently rewatched Days and Nights in the
Forest, made in 1969. Four young men take a road trip, deciding to stay in
a vacation bungalow and steam-rolling their way in over the gatekeeper’s
objections, despite not having the required permit. They get drunk, kill time,
flirt with local girls of various social class. It becomes plain that none of
the four really have anything going to justify their jocular sense of
privilege, and this drives the film’s increasingly stark examination of India’s
bitter, callous class distinctions. By the end, Ray has masterfully demonstrated
the severity of the lacks in their perception – both of their immediate
surroundings and of the bleak facts of life histories more generally (and the
“forest” of the film’s title is about as barren a location as you could ever
imagine attracting that label) - but it seems unlikely that anything will
change: the demands of what it takes to keep going are just too all-consuming.

Lack of angst

That
summary doesn’t convey the fluidity of events and exchanges or the unforced
vitality of Ray’s observations: the film is entirely engrossing even when
little seems to be happening. In other works, he explores other aspects of the
country’s tangled identity and history, finding little to celebrate
unambiguously. For instance, his late film The
Chess Players suggests that what to Western eyes often seems most
“civilized” or “refined” about the country may be at the heart of its
over-passivity at the hands of the largely unprincipled (behind all the pomp
and formality) British occupiers.

In
trying to sell me on Vishwaroopam, my
acquaintance seemed to put a lot of weight on what he perceived as the film’s
lack of angst, and I guess the Indian cinema I’ve described has a lot of that.
From all accounts, India has a flourishing, tech-savvy business class that
likely sees as little connection between itself and Ray’s protagonists as a Bay
Street lawyer sees between herself and the protagonists of Goin’ down the Road. On the other hand, I’m not sure jaunty yarns
about international terror networks and secret identities really have much to
do with any of us. Such I guess is
the eternal see-saw of cinematic virtue…

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Mike Nichols’ Closer
was the perfect pre-Christmas middlebrow package, tailor-made to allow any
number of think pieces about the sexual zeitgeist. But I must confess that for
me, the film failed to spark any meaningful reactions. Based on a play by
Patrick Marber, it follows four characters in modern-day London, moving through
every permutation of love (except the same-sex ones, although I suppose you can
read a streak of latent homosexuality into it) and hate. The characters span
every emotion from joy to neediness to anger and bilious self-righteousness;
they're often at their most savage when accusing others of transgressions that
they’ve recently committed themselves. You can certainly see how on stage this
would have generated a draining sense of animalistic claustrophobia. But on
film the structure seems contrived; it’s all too easy to write this off as a
nasty self-contained anecdote of limited relevance to the rest of our lives.
Nichols’ smooth, ingratiating handling just renders it all the more
dispensable. The star cast (Julia Roberts. Jude Law, Natalie Portman) are all
OK, but it’s Clive Owen who’s justly receiving the most attention – he’s the
only one of the four to suggest real savage depths, whereas the others seem
mostly like prisoners of circumstance.

House of Flying Daggers

Zhang Yimou’s House
of Flying Daggers also has just four speaking parts of any consequence,
although the film sweeps forward so grandly that one might not realize it. It’s
Zhang’s second straight kung fu epic after Hero,
and has a more mature, reflective tone – with hindsight it makes the earlier
film seem hyperactive. In this one the action sequences (also generally more
intimate and earthbound than in Hero,
although with some stunning exceptions) alternate with long sequences of dance
or intimacy; the soft green of spring predominates where the earlier film’s
colour schemes spanned the seasons. The plot involves a government plan to
pierce the heart of the rebel Flying Daggers by having a young policeman
ingratiate himself with a blind girl who’s the daughter of the rebels’ former
leader; it has numerous twists and turns, but these too seem relaxed and
incremental after the dramatic reinventions of Hero. On the whole, less is more – the film is consistently
beguiling, although it doesn’t tease the senses or the imagination as fully as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, still
the genre’s mainstream high-water mark.

Million Dollar Baby

A couple of years ago, after Space Cowboys and Absolute
Power and True Crime and Blood Work, I thought Eastwood must
finally be winding down, content to stay within familiar parameters. Now, after
the astonishing one-two punch of Mystic
River and Million Dollar Baby, he
again seems close to the summit of American directors. Mystic River translated the cold moral certainty of his classic
persona into a complex examination of guilt and innocence, fully understood by
the film as relative rather than absolute states; at times, it had a
transcendent intensity and sense of purpose.

The new film is equally as engrossing, although
it’s not as obviously ambitious. Eastwood plays the manager of an old-style
boxing gym, and Morgan Freeman is the sidekick who helps look after the place.
The two circle each other in a sparring developed over decades, but Eastwood’s
daily visits to mass and his playful taunting of the priest evidence an
unresolved yearning (the movie refers to but never explains a long-estranged daughter).
A young woman, played by Hilary Swank, starts coming to the gym and asking
Eastwood to be her personal trainer – he turns her down flat, but with
Freeman’s help she gradually wins him over, and he makes a devastating,
title-contending fighter of her.

The film shows no shame with boxing clichés –
Freeman’s voice on the soundtrack lodges enough homilies to populate an entire
genre. The characters are essentially stock figures, and much of the trajectory
is familiar. But Million Dollar Baby
seems to understand these mechanics more fully and fluently than almost any
other film I’ve seen. Boxing is of course an increasingly marginalized sport,
seemingly too savage and resistant to contemporary styling to sit comfortably
in the mainstream, but still fascinating for its immediacy and effortless
symbolism. Eastwood’s film is an eloquent study in how boxing’s strange
mechanics and culture redefine the three main characters, a theme shaped and
deepened through multiple subtleties.

His customary low-key but fluidly minimal style
makes for a handsome work, with darkness framing the edges of most frames. The
style is perfectly suited to its subject – you get the feeling that the light
of the boxing ring is their only arena of possible redemption, and there’s something
beautiful in how Eastwood circles the perimeter during her fights, intervening
at time-outs to patch up her cuts and to explain to her (as if near-omnipotent
for all his limitations) the opponent’s psychology.

The three actors are all excellent – Swank,
already a revelation in Boys Don’t Cry,
zooms back after a run of indifferent roles with another revelation of an
entirely different kind. Million Dollar
Baby isn’t as ambitious as Mystic
River and I suppose its impact is a little more localized – it’s so
recognizable as a genre piece that you can’t help but focus on the aesthetic
styling. Which helps you realize how long Eastwood has been moving in this
direction. In the 70’s, The Outlaw Josey
Wales and The Gauntlet were both
great genre entertainments, seeped in his shorthand view of character, but
already exhibiting unusual richness, elaboration and if anything excessive
mythmaking. Eastwood stagnated a bit in the 80’s, made an amazing comeback in
the early 90’s, and now stands bigger than ever. Actors all rave about his
sense of economy, how his sets seem more adult and relaxed than any others (Million Dollar Baby apparently only
started filming in June, exhibiting a speed to completion that makes all other
directors look bloated). The focus and relaxation shines through in the films.
Eastwood’s authoritarian streak is still problematic, and his films don’t yield
the revelations of the greatest artists, but he’s a fascinating phenomenon, and
the new film is a thrilling experience.

Spanglish

Talking of directors whose self-absorbed
second-rateness is shown up by Eastwood's speed and economy, here's a new film
by James L. Brooks - his first since 1997's As
Good as it Gets. To say the least, the wait doesn't seem to manifest itself
in the quality of the product. The film follows a young Mexican immigrant and
single mother (played by Paz Vega) who takes a job with a plush,
neurosis-ridden Los Angeles family (Adam Sandler plays the best chef in America
- no, I couldn't buy it either - and Tea Leoni is somewhat amazing - maybe
that's a compliment, maybe not - as his high-strung wife); there's some
culture-clashing and assimilation and an understated affinity between Sandler
and Vega. This is all easy to watch in an anonymous, glossy kind of way, but the
film is ultimately quite incoherent, retrenching into an apparent notion of
truth to one's origins that doesn't sit comfortably with all the wallowing in
high-end lifestyles. It feels as though some crucial piece were missing, as
though it were cut out of some longer, more impressionistic and solipsistic
musing...not that I would ask to see any more of it.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).